The gates have been lifted and CES2012 is finally underway in Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of press and tech enthusiasts have taken to the show floor to see what companies have to show off this year.

Those who’ve stopped by Intel’s booth were treated to a new smartphone reference design that was much improved over their previous design, which looked remarkably similar to an iPhone. The device at Intel’s booth is running on their Atom Z2460 processor, a single-core chipset clocked at 1.6GHz. Intel’s reference design is running a stock version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread and also features an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator, 4-inch display, NFC capability, an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera.

The reference design is not marketed directly to consumers; rather, it serves as a reference model for handset makers such as Motorola, HTC and Samsung to use to develop their own smartphones based on Intel’s processors instead of the usual ARM suspects. Intel is attempting to make its way into the smartphone market and aims to convince a few of the big players to develop devices with Intel’s innards.

We’ll stop by the booth a bit later and ask if they’ll let us run a few benchmarks to see how their concept phone compares to the current crop of devices. Previous tests indicate that Intel could give even Tegra 3 a run for its money. Meanwhile, let us know what you think about the reference design phone and/or about Intel’s move into Android.

rooted roms dont count. you wont see ICS on your Captivate , for reals, ever. thank developers for the fact you even know what it looks like in real life.

The Nexus is a ‘high end consumer’ phone, for those that waste large sums of money on mediocre technology. Im not gonna pay almost 2x for a PC with a new version of Windows / OSX on it, without any hardware improvements. and thats what the nexus is. same device, different shape, newer OS bigger price tag.

if we had a benchmark for all devices, with a legit build of ICS on it, then we’d have something to compare against. but we dont, we have 1 device that runs a legit build, god knows how many others running Frankenstein builds that will eventually flip out and try to attack the village.

So in my eyes, I want to know how it stacks, to other devices running Gingerbread. Which is our current industry standard. When ICS holds 50% of market of Android devices, then we can bench again. <3

No the nexus is a Google device. Much as I would love to see an official build of ICS on a Non- Google phone we are still way off from it. After all how long was it before most of us saw gingerbread on our phones? In a perfect world we would all have the latest OS version our phone can handle direct from Google and the manufacturers overlay would be a launcher and widget set only.

It doesn’t have to be dualcore to compete with the other chips. If Medfield’s single core chip can bring the same amount of performance as Nvidia’s Tegra, ARM or Qualcomm, then it doesn’t have to be dualcore. X86 chips are more powerful than Tegra or ARM, that are designed for mobile use. At this point, Intel’s problem is with battery consumption.

rooted roms dont count. you wont see ICS on your Captivate , for reals, ever. thank developers for the fact you even know what it looks like in real life.

The Nexus is a ‘high end consumer’ phone, for those that waste large sums of money on mediocre technology. Im not gonna pay almost 2x for a PC with a new version of Windows / OSX on it, without any hardware improvements. and thats what the nexus is. same device, different shape, newer OS bigger price tag.

if we had a benchmark for all devices, with a legit build of ICS on it, then we’d have something to compare against. but we dont, we have 1 device that runs a legit build, god knows how many others running Frankenstein builds that will eventually flip out and try to attack the village.

So in my eyes, I want to know how it stacks, to other devices running Gingerbread. Which is our current industry standard. When ICS holds 50% of market of Android devices, then we can bench again. <3

No the nexus is a Google device. Much as I would love to see an official build of ICS on a Non- Google phone we are still way off from it. After all how long was it before most of us saw gingerbread on our phones? In a perfect world we would all have the latest OS version our phone can handle direct from Google and the manufacturers overlay would be a launcher and widget set only.

It doesn’t have to be dualcore to compete with the other chips. If Medfield’s single core chip can bring the same amount of performance as Nvidia’s Tegra, ARM or Qualcomm, then it doesn’t have to be dualcore. X86 chips are more powerful than Tegra or ARM, that are designed for mobile use. At this point, Intel’s problem is with battery consumption.